It didn’t interest her, not in the slightest. The basement windows did, low to the ground, and Holmes was pulling a metal pick out from the inside pocket of her coat. She studied its sharpened edge for a moment before jamming it into the top of the window frame, pulling it free from its hinges. I was at her heels, then, and she handed it up to me.
“You didn’t tell Milo about this access point?” August asked, behind me.
“If he’s worth his salt, twelve alarms are going off at Greystone right now.” She dusted off her hands. “Come on.”
Down into a storage room, all rakes and hoes and storage bins, and through the door into a room that looked like it’d been used as a training ring. For combat, maybe, or for something else, but there was a dirt ring in the middle of the floor lined with tape. On the walls were knives and wooden staffs, a set of fencing foils, a pistol with the orange plastic ring around its mouth that meant it was a toy. Did Alistair use it when training his daughter to disarm an enemy? Black ribbons hung from a pipe, thick enough to be blindfolds, and below that were coils of rope, a wooden chair with its seat cut out. I didn’t look too closely. After all my wild curiosity, the years I spent as a boy dreaming of the training I could get from the Holmes family in spying and deduction, how I could be transformed into a weapon at their hands, and here it was, the proof. When I’d asked him for training, my father had given me spy novels to read, but Alistair and Emma had put their children through their paces until they gleamed like blades.
The basement smelled like cedar chips and mold. A set of stairs led up to the main level. Already Holmes was at the door at the far end of the room. She tried the knob once, twice, then pulled out her pick again and got to her knees.
“This door isn’t ever locked,” she said to herself, as if in confirmation.
The door was reinforced with steel bars. The lock was the old-fashioned kind, with a large keyhole you could peer through. I was reminded of the doors I’d liked so much in Prague. What had Holmes said were behind them? Tourist shops? I peered up at the doorframe.
“It’s wired,” I told her, pointing up. “There must be a keypad on the other side, some kind of alarm system.”
“On the far side?” August asked. “I know this house. The only entrance into that room is from this door.”
“What’s inside?” I asked him, but he looked away.
Holmes moved the pick to the left, then the right, and paused. “The silent alarm is about to sound. If we haven’t been detected already, we will be now. I don’t want commentary on what you see. I don’t want judgment. I want you to follow me in and then we move out.”
She looked ill. Pale, drawn, her eyes flat as coins.
And with that last confirmation, I let myself think it, make it into words, the thing I’d known since we boarded that flight back to England but hadn’t wanted to believe. Leander was being kept in this house. In this room. I didn’t know why (though I had my suspicions) or what the consequences were of springing him free, but as Holmes picked the lock, humming that strange, tuneless melody under her breath—even now, she was a creature of habit—I tried not to think about what would happen next. After.
If he was still alive in there.
A click. A creak. Holmes charged in before me on her long legs, August muscling past me to follow, and all I saw, at first, were their coats as I pushed in after them. There was a low buzz in the air, like the vibration of a phone going off in a pocket, but amplified, something hanging between these cinder-block walls. This lightless room.
It was coming from a generator, and the generator was powering a series of beeping machines, something that whirred and something that beeped and something else that had clear plastic tubes and wires that wound up from its base and over to the hospital bed where Leander was lying, in a blue cotton gown, his hair lank and greasy like it hadn’t been washed since we’d left. A tube taped to his mouth, as if to feed him. An IV tower next to him hung with bags that didn’t hold saline and blood. I knew what saline and blood looked like. I’d been in the hospital enough myself. The room was scattered with crutches, a wheelchair, what looked like a Persian rug. It was a makeshift hospital.
This was enough to stop me dead, more so than if the room had been set up for torture or interrogation—though, now that I looked more closely, I thought I saw the metal hardware for hooks and chains still attached to the walls and the ceiling—the idea that Leander had been here, underneath everything, sedated to be kept out of the way of whatever plan was in play.
Except that he wasn’t sedated. He was awake. And Emma Holmes hovered over him in a mask and a lab coat, a scalpel in one latex-gloved hand.
Then she reached over and yanked the cord from the security camera in the corner.
Instinctively, I searched my pockets for a weapon; next to me, August did the same, coming up with nothing but the stained knife he’d pulled out in the museum in Prague.
Charlotte Holmes rushed over and flung herself into her mother’s arms.
“Lottie,” she said, one arm around her daughter, the other pulling off her mask. “Excellent timing. He’s fine to travel. We have about four minutes. Move.”
UNDER EMMA’S SWIFT DIRECTION, AUGUST HELPED HER remove the IVs. I took socks and a sweater from the suitcase in the corner—Leander’s—and helped him into them, taking care to lean in closely to his ear to whisper, “Is she hurting you?”
“She isn’t,” he said, his voice strangely strong. “He is.”